artist biography
My first camera was a Polaroid One Step I received in 1981 at the age of eight. It was a simple instrument that I carried with me wherever I traveled with my family. We were living in California and frequently toured the national parks nearby, winding our way between the pine trees in Yosemite, ambling through the fragile rhyolite canyons of Death Valley, and standing in the shadows of the massive sequoias in the Sierra Mountains. My camera always came along with me, recording the time spent and the places seen. Over time I found I was less interested in photographing expansive vistas as I was in examining the small details; micro fascinated me more than the macro. Even at that age I was intrigued by a fine structure that underlay the greater order of the landscape, a curiosity that has always remained.
As I grew older my interest in the minute details remained and led me to several years of enjoying the experience of studying and teaching biology. After graduating with a degree in Biology in 1995 I worked in the education field for ten years, only recently choosing to leave the profession in order to dedicate more time to my native passion, photography.
More than twenty years after making my first exposures, I still travel to many of the same places I did when I was young, and am still captivated by the complexity of what many have called the intimate landscape. My simple camera has been replaced by a larger version to more accurately render those details onto film, but my focus has remained relatively identical: to capture nature at its most unique and reveal its subtle architecture.
using natural light
I do not use color filters of any kind, choosing to work only with the natural light. While I respect and appreciate the art of digital photography and its associated method of printmaking, I have chosen a more traditional route in keeping with my philosophy of producing images that most accurately and truthfully reflect the landscape at the moment of capture. During the process of photographing, I use positive transparency film, allowing me the greatest combination of color saturation, sharpness, flexibility, and contrast for the images I make in the field. My filters of choice are 1, 2, or 3-stop gradual neutral density Lee filters, which allow me to control the balance of light from sky or horizon to foreground. I also occasionally use a polarizing filter to reduce glare or eliminate reflection.
